Vista and power saving

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

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Greater Manchester
Hi

Here's the situation.

Old 'always on' 24 hours a day PC:

XP SP3 - Pentium 4 HT, Intel Mobo, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB hdd, 250 GB hdd, DVD RW All plugged into an 180 Watt PSU

On Idle this thing sat at 60 Watts, and I was happy leaving it on all the time.

New replacement 'always on' PC.

Vista Ultimate 64 Bit, Pentium D 2.8Ghz , Intel D955 mobo, 4 GB RAM, 3 HDDs (80, 250, 250) plugged into a 500 Watt PSU

On Idle - this one runs at around 135 - 140 Watts.

Now this seems like a big jump to me, and I desperately want to keep power consumption to an absolute minimum if I am leaving it on all the time.

Has anyone had much experience playing with Vista power saving options ?
I want everything to power down when the machine is idle, but I dont want to put it to sleep, as I remote into it quite lot, and it won't wake up when I try this.
I have set the power options, but over time, nothing seems to power down and consumption remains the same...

Any help would really be appreciated.
 
Set the power Scheme to Balanced; that'll allow the CPU to reduce its clockspeed when it's idle. You might have to check the BIOS for related options to allow this, if it's not working immediately.

Set the hard-drives to turn off after 15 minutes or so. Providing nothing is constantly accessing them, they should turn off when not being used.

Aside from that though, there's not much you can do. If the PC has a dedicated graphics card you can use an app to reduce the clockspeed of it which may save some power. Pentium Ds are notoriously power-hungry though, so you're never going to get the system close to the power usage of the old one.
 
Jumping said:
Well considering you have added so much more stuff in the new box what did you expect to happen?
Click to expand...

Well while I expected the newer machine to draw more power under load, I thought at idle, when the PC wasn't doing anything, that there wouldn't be much more of an increase.
 
TheVoice said:
Set the power Scheme to Balanced; that'll allow the CPU to reduce its clockspeed when it's idle. You might have to check the BIOS for related options to allow this, if it's not working immediately.

Set the hard-drives to turn off after 15 minutes or so. Providing nothing is constantly accessing them, they should turn off when not being used.

Aside from that though, there's not much you can do. If the PC has a dedicated graphics card you can use an app to reduce the clockspeed of it which may save some power. Pentium Ds are notoriously power-hungry though, so you're never going to get the system close to the power usage of the old one.
Click to expand...

Thank you. I will try that.
The old machine had onboard graphics, and this one had an Nvidia 7 series card in, one with a silent heatsink on. I may well change this for an old PCI card, as I really have no need for graphics on this machine. That may well drop the watts too !
 
Pinkeyes said:
Thank you. I will try that.
The old machine had onboard graphics, and this one had an Nvidia 7 series card in, one with a silent heatsink on. I may well change this for an old PCI card, as I really have no need for graphics on this machine. That may well drop the watts too !
Click to expand...

Try using a program called RivaTuner to drop the clockspeed and memory speed. I do that on my 8800GTS when I'm not gaming; not sure what effect on power usage it has, but it lowers temps nicely.
 
OK After leaving this thing on 24 hours nothing seems to be spinning down. Power consumption remains at 150 Watts (slightly more than first reported)

I have a hard disk space Vista widget, do you think it monitoring the hard disks will keep them powered up all the time ?
 
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